Transcript: LAYLA K. FEGHALI on The Land in Our Bones /361
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild. I'm Ayana Young. Today we are speaking with Layla K. Feghali.
Layla K. Feghali How do we connect to the power and the land and the stories and the resilience and the strength and the wisdom in our land when we cannot even touch it? I have found that working with our ancestral plant is like a really powerful way that our bodies and spirits realign, that activates the land in our bones because those lands are in our bones. And the plantcestors help wake up that power, that kinship, that love, those places of connection inside of us no matter where we are.
Ayana Young Layla K. Feghali lives between her ancestral village in coastal Lebanon and her diasporic home in California, where she was born and raised by her immigrant family. She is an author, cultural worker, and plantcestral medicine practitioner focused on the re-membrance of baladi (land-based/folk/indigenous) lifeways and ancestral wisdoms from SWANA*. Her dedication is to stewardship of our earth's eco-cultural integrity, sovereignty, and the many layers of relational restoration and transformation that entails. Feghali's upcoming book The Land in Our Bones, documents ethnobotanical and cultural healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world. The book re-maps Canaan (the Levant) and the Crossroads (the "Middle East"), while engaging nuanced conversations about identity, loss, belonging, trauma, and rematriation. It features her Plantcestral Re-Membrance methodology as an emergent pathway towards cultural repair for diasporic and colonized communities, and highlights the critical importance of tending the land and life where we are to restore the fundamental integrity, dignity, and regeneration of our earth's multispecies communities. You can learn more about Feghali's work and visit the community archival project she hosts at www.RiverRoseRemembrance.com or River Rose Remembrance on IG + FB.
*SWANA stands for Southwest Asia and North Africa Alessio centric way to describe the region commonly referred to as the Middle East and North Africa.
Layla, thank you so much for joining us again. Gosh, our conversation in 2020…crazy to think about…was so enlivening, so thrilled to be welcoming you back onto the podcast.
Layla K. Feghali Thank you so much. Well, I can't believe that much time has passed, actually.
Ayana Young Yeah, a lot has happened in the world. And as we begin to settle into this space, I want to ground in how you're feeling and grieving and comprehending life right now. If you'd be open to sharing any reflections, and yeah, what are you exploring in this present moment?
Layla K. Feghali Yeah, that is such a huge question right now. As well, I will remind folks, and for those who don't know me from before, but I'm Lebanese and I grew up in California, and I live half time in my village in Lebanon. And so, you know, Lebanon is an extension of Palestine as I see it. And so, what's happening in Palestine right now is deeply intimate to my lived reality and, in fact, south of Lebanon is also being bombarded by the Zionists right now. And so, you know, for me and my community, this time has been... it's honestly like, it's impossible to verbalize feelings. Every moment is its own set of, you know, of emotions. And it's interesting, I've noticed that our Western allies talk a lot about grief right now, but to be honest, I don't really relate to the experience of grief in the Western sense of the word right now. There has been incredible loss, but we really haven't had the chance to grieve. You know, I don't think that we've arrived there. You know, we haven't had the opportunity to bury our dead. Nonetheless, take a moment to even process completely what's happening and I think I can speak for myself knowing that so many others that I speak and connect with feel similarly, but we're really in the fight. You know, we're really just in full responsiveness to the needs of this moment and we haven't had the privilege to really, truly grieve to be completely honest. Perhaps at some point, we will have that space, but yeah, it's just been an unbearable and unfathomable time.
Ayana Young Yeah, I could imagine that it's hard to grieve when people are in survival mode. And I can imagine there not being a lot of space to grieve because so many folks are having to deal with moment by moment issues. And I know for myself, I find the grief comes later, like after the adrenaline, after that fight or flight nervous system response has settled and then it's like—
Layla K. Feghali Yeah, exactly. You know, it's, and I don't know, for me, I've honestly felt so much more rage than anything, I think I've felt more rage than I have in my entire life. And, you know, I think that's part of the survival response because we need to fight. We are being put in a position where we need, you know, our righteous rage and our full spectrum of feelings in the face of just so much sheer violation of life that's just going unchecked, really, by the world. So... But yes, I sometimes say, you know, the wound is still open as an herbalist. You know, you can't really start healing a wound while it's still gushing with blood. And right now, we're still bleeding. We're bleeding and we need the attention of the world to stop the bleeding and then we can talk about, or feel and just be with the immense loss.
Ayana Young I'd like to hear a bit more about the rage, the righteous rage, you're speaking of, of course, maybe you share the general sense of what that is. But even if you would be open to getting more detailed for your own rage or maybe even a collective rage what you're tapping into.
Layla K. Feghali Yeah, you know, I feel like rage is a very taboo feeling in the American public, especially as an Arab. It just like screams terrorists, I suppose. I don't know. But I feel rage is a deeply, deeply fundamental, life-affirming feeling. You know, it is a life-affirming feeling and it is an innate function of our intelligent bodies and systems and as parts of this earth, to respond when something is just fundamentally wrong. And for me, the righteous rage just really signals, um...you know, that there is a type of injustice that is truly a threat and a violation to the life of the collective, to the life of our lands, to our own lives in a way that needs a fierce, fierce energy of response, of defense, of protective....whatever it requires, by all means, necessary, really to intervene with it, to interfere with it. And so, I think the rage is a call to action. And it's a part of my body and my being that tells me that I am still alive despite all these things....that my heart is still alive and awake and that I have incredible love and incredible trust in the righteousness and the integrity of life. And my responsibility as an active agent who can be part of its defense and must be part of doing whatever I can and finding my agency to just be a part of it, actively. And I feel like it's a really healthy mechanism and it's one we need to learn. These times are calling us to truly harness and channel more, instead of shy away from in discomfort or seek to, to ease...you know, because it's really, it's intelligent, and it's in place. It's called for.
Ayana Young Yeah, there's so much there. And I wonder if we could understand rage and the release of these feelings a bit more through your forthcoming book, The Land in Our Bones. And if you could also talk about the path that led you to writing it and investing so deeply into the concept of remembrance.
Layla K. Feghali Yeah, thank you, you know, I really did not know when I wrote this book that it would be born into this particular moment in the world. I had no idea and I often think, Had I had been writing it right now, how much would have changed? How would it have looked different? What would look different? So my book, The Land in Our Bones is about these lands. It's a book about the herbal and earth-based healing traditions and cultures in the lands between Syria and the Sanai, which include Lebanon, where my own ancestors are from, and, of course, beloved Palestine, Jordan and Syria and the Sinai region of Egypt. And, in a lot of ways, the righteous rage is in there because the book is truly, it's kind of an homage and a love letter to my ancestors in many ways to the things they've passed down to me, to our lands, to what I've learned from our lands, to what I've learned from my grandparents, to my real devotion to making sure that our life-affirming cultures are—which are really being eroded intentionally by Empire, every generation a little bit more—to make sure that they're not that they're not erased, that they're not, that they don't disappear. And that just to do my very humble part in sharing and sharing my pieces, what I have been honored to, to gather, to understand, to connect to in the land-based kinship of our region.
And the rage really exists in that, you know, in order to really talk about herbalism and healing cultures of the land it requires a reckoning with colonialism and these legacies of empire that have severed our sovereign relationships to it. And it's really an interrogation of colonialism as much as it is an archive or a sharing, a retelling of our traditions and our relationship and our kinship to place that perseveres and persists despite all and every effort of every empire that has crossed our region for the past 1000s of years, really, to dilute or erase that. And so....and why I wrote it or what inspired me to write it really. It's twofold. On one hand, as a child of diasporas....and our diasporas make up one of the largest in the world, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine respectively, have over 50% of our populations living outside of our homelands. I mean, if you could just absorb for a moment how immense that is. And that's a direct result of war and Empire. Nobody leaves home 'just because.' And so, on one hand...it's, you know, my experience as a dysphoric person, I am born into sort of a reckoning with those legacies, and just my most simple effort to place myself to understand who I am, where I come from, what belonging means and how to heal all the incredible ruptures that I've witnessed. I've felt I've just known in the stories of where I come from and also the incredible love, the incredible resilience, the steadfastness, and the love...our culture is incredibly generous and abundant, and you know, it's incredible. It's incredible to have watched my grandmother in diaspora just watched her create a world of, you know, plants and foods and traditions that somehow she could carry with her across oceans, that I knew the smells of my homeland before I could even go there because of her, that in eras of displacement and so many different generations and ways of struggle, that there's so much life and persistence and healing and connection to the Earth that she and my parents had managed to just embody by the nature of who they are. And so that's kind of what remembrance is about, to me.
I use the language of remembrance, because it's both to remember, which is to return to a fundamental part of our essence or our internal sense of knowing of being a truth—a truth that does not waver. And it's also to re-member, which is to collect the dismembered pieces, to restore a cohesive form. And I don't mean that in the like, 'we can just pick up the pieces and it becomes how it used to be kind-of-way, but I mean that in sort of the quest and the liberatory quest, really, to realign with the wholeness, and just the fundamental integrity within our relationship to land. You know, in all my seeking, and in all my searching for truths, or for wisdom or for healing, really, the only thing that has been explicitly, steadily clear to me is that as a species, the steady is truth. The steadiest thing that we can rely on, and that determines who we are, is our relationship to the Earth. And I think that remembrance, for me, is a return to, kind of, the indigenous attunement, that all of our global ancestors have to these fundamental elements that make our lives what they are. And that means liberation from all the systems that have disrupted that, because colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, all of these systems that have tried to kind of rearrange our sovereign relationship to the life-making elements of this planet, as species who are in communication with other species, have have been to disrupt that innate power, the power in that innate connection, and rearrange it around profit and control and domination and greed. So remembrance is as much kind of a quest to reclaim, connection to home in the personal cultural sense as it is a quest to to realign our Earth, our collective with values of life affirmation that ensure the integrity of our existence as a multispecies planet.
Ayana Young I think it could be helpful for our listeners, if you could situate us in the SWANA region, and what it means to participate in the biladi, the land-based folk indigenous lifeways and ancestral wisdoms of that region.
Layla K. Feghali SWANA stands for Southwest Asia and North Africa, and is a term that some activists from our region have kind of reclaimed as an alternative to the Middle East and North Africa. It's a less colonial way to refer to the geographic placement of the region because the Middle East as our Palestinian scholar, Uncle Edward Said said and taught us in his book Orientalism really beckons the question Middle and East of where and places Europe as the center. And so, in an effort to sort of decenter Europe, our activist communities have begun to popularize that term. And I have participated in that, but actually, in my book, I also choose to step away from the term SWANA and I referred to our broader region as the Crossroads, which was a word that actually was offered by Sanyu Estelle Nagenda, who's somebody who was involved in a series of conversations I had been having with people in our communities around How do we really grapple with remapping this region? and especially, my own desire to actually move away from the colonial continental bordering altogether. People might wonder why our region is such a hotspot for Empire and for war, and it's not because we're terrorists, obviously, I hope to the listeners of this podcast that that is true. But it's because we are geopolitically located at the intersection of Africa and Asia, at the threshold of the Mediterranean which crosses into Europe. So I think the relationship between our region and the African continent in particular has really been manipulated by European colonizers over the generations to leverage a proximity to the quote, unquote, "cradle of civilization." And, you know, it's all it's honestly deeply wrapped up in anti-Blackness and there's a lot of critique amongst our African siblings and scholars that share a lot about the problematic nature of also severing the continent of Africa into North Africa—delegating some kind of proximity to Europe or to whiteness.
I personally would like to in the effort to remember and to really grapple with colonial legacies on our region, to really take it back to the source like I kind of mentioned in the remembrance. A concept that I follow, which is the source is the Earth, and so what are ways that we can reconceptualize and remap our geographies beyond—the continents were also created as colonial constructs—the names of them, where they start and end. Our region is, you know, connected by land to the African continent. Gaza, in particular, is the literal bridge between the African continent and so-called West Asia. And so what are ways that we contend with and reconceptualize really the paradigms in which we orient our lands when the earth is the center?...When our relationships culturally, and genetically and cosmologically and ecologically for generations and migrationally for generations, define how we narrate the relationships and who we are on unlike a more borderless kind of Earth? So I actually move away from SWANA and try to rest in a language like Crossroads, which kind of depicts a little bit more of the actual, like story of our land also, as a threshold, really. And I think the way I see what's happening in Palestine is a very profound indication of that threshold because I also think that we are also a threshold of profound liberation from Empire right now. And, you know, our generation is being given the incredibly profound opportunity to be part of the largest collective healing and liberation project of our time, really, potentially. Because I think that when this threshold becomes liberatory when....when the possibilities of liberation in Palestine become materialized because of our participation, because of our reinforcement and by way of our reinforcement that Empire itself has the opportunity to fall all over across the Earth. And I feel like our region is a threshold in so many ways, both energetically, and just literally. And then I'm inclined to lean into the power and the mystery and the holiness of that, and the relationships of kinship that it embodies beyond the European agenda of colonization.
Ayana Young There's something that I think is important to talk about. This moment is extremely urgent and throughout the ongoing Israeli invasion and the siege on Gaza, the Israeli military have specifically targeted journalists and intellectuals. In just one horrible example, Human Rights Watch has confirmed that strikes on journalists in Lebanon were deliberate. And we know this is not the only instance of such violence against those speaking up for Palestine. So I'm wondering how this particular violence relegates to the ways the settler colonial project is threatened by and often silences and disregards Indigenous wisdom.
Layla K. Feghali Yeah, I think that Indigenous existence is really the issue here for the settler-colonial project of Israel ,of Zionism. And so, of course we know that they target journalists because journalists are the ones who are making visible the atrocities and the realities of our region to the world. And I think some people maybe do wonder Why cultural workers? Why poets? and, you know, teachers and academics and artists have been targeted....musicians, alongside with these journalists. And the reason why is simply because our culture is born out of our relationship with place for 1000s of years for generation after generation. And this is what makes Indigenous culture....this is a defining attribute of what indigeneity means. It is indigeneity you know, is born out of place-based relationships, anchored in the elements of place, and culture doesn't come from this....It doesn't come from thin air. Culture is born out of land, not the other way around. The land is what intonates the colors and the patterns on our traditional dress, the dialects of our languages, the metaphors, the cosmological meaning and importance that defines who we are and how we move in the world and why we extend generosity in this way. The land is the origin of our culture. And this is, you know, this is proof of our indigeneity. Our culture....there is no song, there is no dance, there is no expression or form from our region that does not mention or emerge explicitly from our relationship to land. And because Israel's an ethnic cleansing project, genociding our actual bodies and people as they are in Gaza right now, is not enough. They want to ensure that there is no testament, that there is no legacy of our cultural existence, of our Indigenous existence to place because our mere presence, our mere existence is a threat to their myth of holy belonging on our backs or of righteous displacement and statehood that does not include integrity or respect for the people who have stewarded the place and been there, you know, for generation after generation.
And so we are the land, like the land is our literal bones, everywhere we go. And that is an ultimate threat, especially because due to the damage and the constant aggression of Empire, in our region, we are one of the largest diasporas on this Earth right now. And it's impossible to erase us, even if you eliminate every single Palestinian from the land of Palestine, and then move on to Lebanon and then move on to wherever. It is impossible to erase us. And they know that our culture carries on, it carries on. And in fact, every time they target it, it becomes more eternal. So you know, it's a threat, we're a threat. And I believe that the journalists being targeted right now—it's particular too—because not only are they showing the news, but we're in a new era of journalism where journalists are regular people with phones who report on social media who are not dependent on the media to make palatable our realities, and we have reclaimed our power. We have reclaimed our power in the face of their effort to narrate us.
Ayana Young I guess, as my head is kind of spinning in the grief and discomfort and the desire to figure it out, like how does this get fixed? How do we as a collective move out of this constant barrage of violence and trauma over and over again? As I'm, like, in that whirlwind, I'm thinking back to herbal and practical support. Yeah, maybe if we could go to the plants for a moment, I'd like to help us out here. And you know, you've created herbal guides and resources for crises previously, and I'm wondering what herbs and resources you're turning to now?
Layla K. Feghali Mm hmm. Yeah, we did. We created an herbal guide called li beirut, an herbal and healing guide, actually, for proof that there's constant crises in our region. It was in response to the Beirut blast, the port of Beirut was...it exploded and also damaged large portions of our city, killing many people. We, too, were pulling our dead from under the rubble with absolutely no support from our own state, and so on and so forth. And so we had created the li beirut herbal guide, as well as some trauma regulation, videos, resources for folks dealing with the incredible shock at that time, and the enduring just layers of of systems collapse, the economic collapse that continue to multiply and become more and more severe in Lebanon as people are forced to find ways to survive with incredible...all kinds of new limitations constantly, to the practical, just things that practical things that most of us in the West take for granted.
So, that guide is still available. It's available for purchase and print and it's also available for free on our hub website, as well as the videos. And, you know, I have to say that as an herbalist who often turns to the plants to support in times of crisis this time has challenged me profoundly. It's the first time where something about just putting out healing resources, so to speak, for my broader community just has not felt right yet. It doesn't feel right because I do not believe that...You know, I think that in the way that the West relates to healing and to herbs is that somehow it's going to take away what hurts and I don't believe that that's how it works. But I also, I don't believe that that's what this time requires. I don't believe there is a remedy for this time. I don't believe that we should be seeking...We should be seeking to comfort the feelings, kind of like what I was saying before. I think our task right now is to harness the grief and the rage towards action. I really believe that that is our task.
That being said, I know...I and I'll say about that, also that, you know, when people talk about trauma, you know, trauma is not just because of what happens to you. It's not just because of the violence that you experience. Trauma is about your lack of agency in the face of violence. And I want to just remind people that our bodies are intelligent, and our impulse to act and our desire to act should be enacted, both because it's righteous and it's needed right now. And also, because that is what protects us. That is what protects us from the enduring impact, from the ways that our agency is taken from us. We have incredible power. We have incredible power.
I am watching young children and Gaza. There is a nine-year-old journalist who has found the power amidst unfathomable violence and loss and the act of displacement of her family from one part of Gaza to the next to the next, to use her voice, to report what is happening at age nine. We who live in the belly of the beast, who do not fear bombs on our heads every moment, we need to completely destroy the way that capitalism has indoctrinated us with attachment to comfort and privilege and feeling good. And it's so oppressive, we need to allow our bodies and our beings to feel what we feel and to harness those things and to see them as a form of power and responsibility, and to really enact them. So I just want to name that.
And within that context, I want to say that, yes, herbs can support our endurance. Herbs can support our sustenance in a very practical way. And one thing, the way that I've been leaning in on the land—land is a partnership of incredible power. It is a lifeline to our fundamental nature as a species who has everything that we need on our Earth, to exist to survive, to do well. And I think that leaning into land, and the plants are this immediate and this constant way that we in our bodies kind of wake up the land inside of us, the elements of life, and activate the kinship and the power of our generational relationship to land in our own beings. And I think that starting to really look at this partnership—this partnership of love and life as one of both strength, possibility, and revelation is something that I'm interested in and trying to actively lean in on with the plants. This might sound a little abstract, but what I know is that my plantcestors, which are the plants of my ancestral lineage, our plants who are our ancestors, our plants who have evolved and helped us become who we are generation after generation, and the plancestors have plates that give me life that endow me with life every day that bless my body with the miracle of of existence every single day, And in this exact moment as I breathe the oxygen that they that they create for me—that they are that they realign us that they remember us towards that access of fundamental truth. And that fundamental truth has the power to unveil pathways of resistance, honestly, of resistance to the forces that oppose and that tried to dismantle the integrity of this Earth, of our living existence, of our cultures, of our power. And that that power is so accessible to us because plants are a part of our life that I'm interested in leaning into, my plantcestors, and listening more deeply and really leaning into the relationships as kind of an aid towards practical action.
I think often about how Harriet Tubman realized the pathways, you know, of the Underground Railroad in her dreams. You know, I think about the fact that she was a community herbalist. I think about the fact that I know from my own relationship to the land, from my ancestral stories with the land, you know, that the land makes way and gives way to strength. I know because we're watching people who know their land, they know their land, their intimacy with place has allowed them avenues of protection, of survival, of self preservation that is contingent completely on a relationship to place. And that our grandmothers, you know, our grandmothers have survived on the herbs that grow around them for 1000s of years, that they have nourished survival for me to exist. There are so many generations of empire and exile that precede me and my lineage alone. For me to exist, that kinship with the land and with the sustenance of the land, but also the strength, the power, the guidance that partnership with place endows is our literal lifeline.
And so these days for me, some plants that have been present with me a lot have been...Hawthorn has been really present with me. In fact, I was in the cedar forest in Lebanon in June, and this hawthorn tree, I spend so much time in that cedar forest, but it's like this place that I have walked past and through a million times. This hawthorn tree caught my attention this year, and kind of was under the radar for so many years before that. And it just was glowing with flowers. It was just glowing with flowers. And I knew I was like, Oh my gosh, this is one of those moments where I need to make a flower essence because this tree is calling my attention. And, you know, months later, my feeling has been that the land has also communicating with me beforehand. That the land has been taking care of me, that the past is taking care of our future. And that that hawthorne flower essence that I made in June is a remedy that was made because my community would need it now. And so when I sit with the hawthorn and you know, I'm planning on sharing it with our communities more soon, hopefully, in some remedies that can support. It's not just for it's not for the comfort. It's not for the comfort, it's for the clarity. It's for the land that knew that there was a need and what the land knows, what the land in that forest that has almost been extinct from the face of this planet, that specific place, what that place knows about surviving, about resisting, about freedom, and about persistence, and how that knowing can can fill my own body, my own spirit through this threshold towards liberation.
Ayana Young That feels very comforting to hear you speak about the plants in this way. And if you would go into the plantcestors a bit more. I would really love that.
Layla K. Feghali Yes, so the plantcestors, you know, the plants are our ancestors. And, you know, we have evolved because of them. They've been on this earth evolving and surviving for longer than us as a species. And our plants of place, of our lineages in particular, have literally made the fibers of who we are. And so as a diasporic person, especially one that has kind of been reckoning because I grew up in an era where Lebanon was in war for the first 13 years of my life or so, something like that. And it was a big part of my generation's experience and the ruptures that got created by that, we're still reckoning with today. And so the plantcestors for me have been a way....you know, I know that our land and the specific land of our lineages, it carries stories and memory and power and life for many eras before and beyond, hopefully, these moments. And that when I haven't been able to go and be in my land, you know, so much of our region are not only in diaspora, but in exile. And so how do we connect to the power in the land and the stories and the memory and the resilience and the strength and the wisdom in our land when we cannot even touch it? And I have found that working with our ancestral plants is like a really powerful way that our bodies and spirits kind of realign, it activates the land in our bones because those lands are in our bones, and the plantcestors help wake up that power, that kinship, that love—just kind of activate those places of connection inside of us no matter where we are.
Ayana Young Gosh, it feels so good to come back to the plant world for a moment in the midst of all the chaos outside. And also, I'm sure for many of us inside our bodies and our heads and it's a really good reminder, I think, for all of us. But I'm speaking for myself when I get so trapped by the racing mind of the intensity of this time, it's like, come back to the plants. Breathe with the plants. Take a moment with them because I do think they can ground us and keep us steady and even able to keep going in a good way. And gosh, Layla, this has been such a beautiful conversation and I have a lot of other thoughts that are going through my head. But potentially as we begin to close, if there's anything that I haven't asked, or you haven't mentioned yet, I just want to give you the space to choose a direction of how we close out this conversation.
Layla K. Feghali Thank you. Yes, there's two things that are on my mind. One is on that note of the plants, you know...one thing I will say is that when the genocide began, I was still in Lebanon in my village and my village shares the same water as as Gaza. You know, it's the coastal village that is just 200 miles north of Gaza. And every day I was going down to the water to talk to the water and to talk to the elements and I could feel the visceral energy of what was happening in our lands. And I felt such power somehow even though it was so visceral and it was so much less safe because Lebanon has been under threat since the beginning of this constantly. But there was a lot of power and I had a lot of grief when it became time for me to return to my home in California for a moment. And I had grief because I really felt like part of my power existed in being in proximity to that land and those elements and being able to attune just being there. But as I tended my California native garden upon return, which was completely overgrown and really needed my care and attention, I felt like the plants here were reminding me that they have endured, you know, the probably the most violent and extreme version of settler colonial violence and genocide on the history of this planet. That you know, 95% of the Indigenous populations in the so-called U.S. on Turtle Island were annihilated. And that somehow, these plants and their people still exist and still persist and still find ways to resist. And that these plants also had a message that they know and that they help, they can help, they can help guide and survive, and teach us something in this moment about how to become free, and how to remember when so much has been lost.
And so I want to just say that in terms of just reminding people, too, that this struggle is also this threshold. It directly implicates us in so many ways and layers, and that decolonization is not just a metaphor, and these plantcestral ways. I mean, this in a very literal way that the land has messages because the land wants to return back to itself and that includes its people too. And so that's one thing.
And then the other thing on my mind is just related, somehow, but I keep hearing people say Palestine is freeing us. And I think it's so beautiful and powerful, because I think it's true to a degree. But I want to caution against the narrative that Palestine is freeing us and that we are somehow displaced from the frontlines, specifically in the context of Palestinian liberation, which has always acted knowing that the world must reinforce the actions and be part of the frontline because it is a struggle against Empire that we are all implicated in. And we...you know, one thing that I really feel in this moment is that, while the fall of Empire is inevitable, we are in a very tenuous and liminal threshold that requires stewardship.
And I think about my Birth Chapter, actually, the Birth Chapter of my book, in some ways, feels more relevant to the medicine for this moment than any other part. I think that we are in this liminal, tenuous threshold that resembles birth somehow. And that birth is not...you know, life is not guaranteed when you're in the midst of birth. A responsiveness to every moment within the threshold of full-hearted stewardship of every single moment within the threshold, that changes every day. We wake up and it's a new...there's something new, the landscape transforms, possibilities transform in this direction or that direction, and that we must really see ourselves as part of the literal frontlines. And take on stewardship of this threshold from where we are, from the places we find ourselves. And that means taking care of the life in front of us, as I say a lot in my book which comes from my grandmothers. And taking care of the life in front of us means holding our places responsible to the integrity of life.
In America, we exist on the land, where every single weapon that is killing a child in Gaza, is being dropped. We live in the only country. There is only one place—my friend is from Arkansas and they reminded me that the only place on the entire planet that produces white phosphorus that is destroying the land and people of Lebanon and Palestine right now is in only one city in Arkansas—here, in our places, in our cities, that we have incredible power and incredible responsibility. And I want to just remind people that Palestine may be freeing us but only if we also become Palestine. Our freedom is in our hands. The world's freedom and the possibility of this collective liberation is in our hands and we are indebted to it, you know, on this land that has been settled and occupied for the past 500 years. And as our Indigenous relatives have been saying Palestine is the tip of the spear. So, you know, I want to just leave on that note of like, let's tend the sacred threshold of liberation through action and through action from where we are because we have incredible power. And the healing that is possible here is massive, but it is not guaranteed. It is in our hands. And let's treat it with the duty and the care that it really deserves.
Ayana Young Thank you, Layla. And I'm grateful for the reminder that empires will inevitably fall and that we do have the power to threaten colonial forces. And I think remembering that for us is really important, especially in times where things feel out of control and the intensity is so overwhelming. We can't give into thinking that we can't make a difference.
Evan Tenenbaum Thank you for listening to For The Wild. The music in today's episode is by Lionmilk. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, José Alejandro Rivera, Bailey Bigger, and Evan Tenenbaum.